Ajax Penumbra 1969 An FSG Digital Original

It is August 1969. The Summer of Love is a fading memory. The streets of San Francisco pulse to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Marvin Gaye. And of jackhammers: A futuristic pyramid of a skyscraper is rising a few blocks from City Lights bookstore and an unprecedented subway tunnel is being built under the bay. Meanwhile, south of the city, orchards are quickly giving way to a brand-new industry built on silicon.

But young Ajax Penumbra has not arrived in San Francisco looking for free love or a glimpse of the technological future. He is seeking a book—the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. The last record of the book locates it in the San Francisco of more than a century earlier, and on that scant bit of evidence, Penumbra’s university has dispatched him west to acquire it for their library.

After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles across a 24-hour bookstore, and the possibilities before him expand exponentially . . .

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About Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Farrar, Straus and Company was founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus and John C. Farrar. In 1964 Robert Giroux's name was added to the roster and the company became Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The firm is renowned for its international list of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux authors have won extraordinary acclaim over the years, including numerous National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and twenty-two Nobel Prizes in literature.

Announcements

Projects you “desperately want to publish” but that you also can’t imagine “sliding comfortably between those two stiff pieces of cardboard” is how Farrar, Straus & Giroux senior editor Sean McDonald described FSG Originals, the publisher’s paperback line. Launched by McDonald and FSG editor Emily Bell in 2011, the imprint has published 20 titles to date, and recently gave birth to a digital line, Digital Originals. FSG Originals has just started promoting one of its 2014 summer titles, The Silent History, and McDonald said the work (it’s adapted from the celebrated story-driven app of the same name, which launched in 2012) is exactly the kind of book that fits the imprint’s list.
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